Guilford commissioners, school board try to resolve budget

Those were the watchwords Wednesday when representatives from Guilford County Schools met with the Guilford County Board of Commissioners’ budget committee.

The commissioners are trying to close a $41 million budget gap this year and prevent school and jail bond debt, approved by voters, from ballooning to unmanageable levels.

For months, the commissioners and school board have been discussing putting off some planned school construction and repair projects to slow the amount of bond debt the county issues each year.

On Wednesday the members of the budget committee — most of them new to the board this year — asked for help doing that.

“We would ask you to be sensitive to where we’re at,” said Commissioner Jeff Phillips, chairman of the committee. “Not that you’re not. But to continue to be sensitive to where we’re at in terms of our fiscal health, going forward.”

Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green and Alan Duncan, chairman of the Guilford County Board of Education, agreed that everyone should work together to create a plan for completing planned projects on a reasonable timeline.

“I think we’ve shown some willingness to work with the county commissioners in this process,” Duncan said. “You’re going to want these facilities as much as we are. So we’re just going to have to work on a schedule everybody can live with. We want the dialogue.”

Phillips stressed the need for more meetings between the school board and the commissioners to make sure everyone is on the same page.

“The last thing any of us would want is to be caught in an awkward situation where there’s been a commitment by the school board and an unwillingness to issue bonds by the commissioners because of what we have on hand,” he said.

The county has about $900 million in outstanding debt, most of it from voter-approved bond packages for new schools, school repairs and the new Guilford County jail in downtown Greensboro. The most recent bond package, passed in 2008, totalled $651.4 million.

The county’s annual debt payment is on course to grow to $106 million in 2014. That will make it about 16 percent of the county budget. Unless revenues improve dramatically, the debt payments will remain at or above 15 percent of the total budget until 2018.

Phillips said the commissioners consider the schools to be a top priority, but he doesn’t consider raising taxes to deal with expanding debt service to be an option.

“To move us into a $14 million or $15 million increase in debt service position puts us right into a situation where we wouldn’t have a choice but to increase property taxes,” Phillips said. “That’s a situation I think we all want to avoid.”

Commissioner Hank Henning agreed. “I think if we keep meeting on a regular basis and we keep communicating, we can find solutions that will work for students and the taxpayers,” Henning said.